Europe's Last Summer

by David Fromkin

  Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate who had become one of the world's wealthiest men, had pursued a project not unlike House's a few years earlier. Aiming at an alliance of "Teutonic nations," Carnegie asked rhetorically, "Why should these Teutonic nations ever quarrel?" He imagined that he had lined up the support of the British government, notably of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, for his plan. For it to come into existence, Carnegie believed all that was required was that Kaiser Wilhelm II should take the lead.

  "It lies today in the power of one man to found this league of peace," Carnegie explained in 1907. "It is in the hands of the German emperor alone of all men, that the power to abolish war seems to rest." For reasons not entirely clear, Carnegie thought his plans were ruined by the death of England's King Edward VII in 1910.

  Like Carnegie, House believed that he had the support of the British government for his scheme and that the key to its viability was to gain the support of the Kaiser. In the spring of 1914, immediately upon disembarking in Europe, House therefore made his way to Germany. Aboard ship and on arriving in Germany, House sounded out opinion among well-placed and well-informed Germans and what he heard boded ill for the cause of peace. From Berlin he wrote to the President on May 29 that what he had learned thus far "tended to confirm the opinion as to the nearly impossible chance of bettering conditions." Indeed, he wrote, "the situation is extraordinary. It is jingoism run stark mad." House predicted "an awful cataclysm" unless he or Wilson took a hand in events because "No one in Europe can do it. There is too much hatred, too many jealousies."

  In Russia there was a violent press campaign against Austria. In Austria there was a violent press campaign against Russia. The Pan-German League, a well-connected pressure group in Germany, announced (April 19, 1914) that "France and Russia are preparing for the decisive struggle with Germany and Austria-Hungary and they intend to strike at the first opportunity." A newspaper headline (March 11, 1914) warned Germans that "a war, the like of which history has never seen, is approaching."

  In House's analysis Russia and France would "close in" on Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary if Britain gave the word. But Britain hesitated to do so: if Germany were crushed, who would be left to restrain Russia? Still, if Germany continued to threaten English naval supremacy, London would have no choice but to meet Berlin's challenge.

  Hence, House's peace plan: an agreement between Britain and Germany to limit the size of their respective navies, the agreement to be brokered by the United States. This could bring about the essentially peaceful world that America desired, but—always the realist— House cautioned that there might be "some disadvantage to us" in Britain and Germany getting together.

  Tirpitz pointed to a different flaw in House's plan. "He disclaimed any desire for conquest, and insisted that it was peace that Germany wanted, but the way to maintain it was to put fear into the hearts of her enemies." House wanted Germany to stop expanding its navy, but Tirpitz desired instead "to increase its expansion."

  House's main goal was to set up a meeting with Germany's ruler, and he achieved it. On June 1, in the course of a day-long festival that included religious ceremonies, parades, and the awarding of medals, House was accorded a private personal meeting with the Kaiser that lasted a half hour.

  House's diary entry indicates that the two men discussed "the European situation as it affected the Anglo-Saxon race." In the Kaiser's expressed view, England, Germany, and the United States represented Christian civilization. Latins and Slavs were semi-barbarous, he believed, and also unreliable, so England was wrong to ally with France and Russia. On the other hand, the Teutonic core— Germany, Britain, America—should ally with all the other Europeans in defense of Western civilization "as against the Oriental races."

  House tried to persuade the Kaiser that Germany should abandon its challenge to British naval power. Britain then would no longer have to ally itself with Russia. It was only the threat posed by Germany that drove Britain into Russia's arms. Russia was, if anything, Britain's natural enemy. In other words, it was within the Kaiser's power to accomplish what he claimed to want: England to detach itself from the alliance with Russia and France, and instead to ally itself with Germany.

  House "spoke of the community of interests between England, Germany and the United States and thought that if they stood together the peace of the world could be maintained. . . . However, in my opinion, there could be no understanding between Germany and England so long as he continued to increase his navy." The Kaiser responded that he needed a strong navy, but that when his current enlargement program terminated he would stop.

  House said that his idea was that an American—he or the President—might be in a better position than a European to bring the European powers together. The Kaiser agreed. House said he had wanted to see the Kaiser first, and now would go directly to London to try to secure Britain's agreement, too, to an initiative by the United States along these lines.

  House left Germany hopefully. From Paris he reported on June 3 to the President that he had spoken with almost every German of consequence at his meetings and that "I am glad to tell you that I have been as successful as anticipated and have ample material to open negotiations in London." The German emperor had "seemed pleased that I had undertaken to start the work" and "concurred also in my suggestion that whatever program America, England, and Germany agreed to would be successful."

  The heart of the matter, as House saw it, was that "both England and Germany have one feeling in common and that is fear of one another." His task, he believed, was to dispel these fears by bringing together the leaders of the two countries and encouraging them to get to know and to trust one another. House believed in face-to-face resolution of problems at the top. He considered it "essential that principals should get together" to iron out misunderstandings. He felt that he was "in a fair way to a beginning of the great task that I have undertaken."

  House traveled to London on June 9. He noted in his diary that Walter Hines Page, the U.S. ambassador to Britain, "was kind enough to say that he considered my work in Germany the most important done in this generation." Page arranged for House to meet with Sir Edward Grey. It was not easy. House explained to Wilson: "I find here everything cluttered up with social affairs and it is impossible to work quickly. Here they have thoughts on Ascot, garden parties, etc., etc."

  On June 27 the meeting with Grey finally took place over lunch. Although others were present, House and Grey did almost all the talking. They had a wide-ranging discussion of the troubled European political situation. They agreed that France's leaders had given up all thought of recovering the territories in Alsace and Lorraine, or of taking revenge on Germany. The French people still harbored such a dream, but statesmen in France recognized that the continuing growth of the German population vis-à-vis France made that goal an ever more remote possibility.

  As to Russia and Britain, Grey remarked that the two came into contact with each other at so many points around the world that it was important to keep on the best of terms. Grey claimed to understand Germany's felt need to build a large fleet. It was House who warned Grey—and not Grey who warned House—"of the militant war spirit in Germany and of the high tension of the people. . . . I thought Germany would strike quickly when she moved. That there would be no parley or discussion. That when she felt that a difficulty could not be overcome by peaceful negotiations, she would take no chances, but would strike. I thought the Kaiser himself and most of his immediate advisors did not want war because they wished Germany to expand commercially and grow in wealth, but the army was military and aggressive and ready for war at any time."

  Yet the two men agreed—less than twenty-four hours before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated—that "Neither England, Germany, Russia, nor France desire war." Looking presciently to a less visible but more long-term threat to global stability, House urged the four European powers to enter into an agreement with the United States where
by, acting together, they could provide credit at lower interest notes to "the undeveloped countries of the earth."

  As the month of June drew to a close House continued to meet with European leaders in pursuit of his American dream for the world.

  A decade later, Grey wrote: "House had just come from Berlin, and he had spoken with grave feeling of the impression he had received there; how the air seemed full of the clash of arms, of readiness to strike. This might have been discounted as the impression which would naturally have been produced on an American seeing at close quarters a continental military system for the first time. It was alien to our temperament as to his, but it was familiar to us. We had lived beside it for years; we had known and watched its growth ever since 1870. But House was a man of exceptional knowledge and cool judgment. What if this militarism had now taken control of policy?"

  In the spring of 1914, as House pursued his mission, the chiefs of staff of Germany and Austria, Moltke and Conrad, took the baths together at Carlsbad in Bohemia. They discussed war plans. Moltke also held talks that spring with Gottlieb von Jagow, Germany's foreign minister. Jagow noted that Moltke told him that in two or three years the "military superiority of our enemies would . . . be so great that he did not know how he could overcome them. Today we would still be a match for them. In his opinion there was no alternative to making preventive war in order to defeat the enemy while there was still a chance of victory. The Chief of the General Staff therefore proposed that I should conduct a policy with the aim of provoking a war in the near future."

  PART FOUR

  MURDER!

  CHAPTER 18: THE LAST WALTZ

  Although Franz Ferdinand von Osterreich-Este, nephew of the elderly emperor Franz Joseph and heir apparent to the Hapsburg thrones of Austria and Hungary, was neither consistent nor coherent in his vision of his empire's future, the pieces of his thinking did to some extent fall into place. They took on the hue of a historical mission of restoration, for, if all his political preferences and desires were gratified, it would have amounted to that. Deeply Roman Catholic and anti-Italian, he wanted to undo the unification of Italy that had been achieved under secular auspices a half century earlier; he would have broken up the Italian state and restored papal and Austrian rule. He would have liked the Hapsburg Empire to return to its position in the front row and rank at least equally with Germany in the European power equation. He would revoke Hungary's equal partnership in the Dual Monarchy, and instead would have returned to a central power structure in which all the other nationalities (or at least the numerous Slavs) exercised an equal limited autonomy. Finally, he would have repaired the breach with Russia that dated from the last half of the nineteenth century and would once again combine with the Czar and the King of Prussia to promote the cause of monarchism and traditional values in European and world affairs, as they had, for example, in 1815 as the Holy Alliance.

  In the spring of 1914 the heir apparent was fifty years old. He appeared to have recovered from the illnesses that had plagued him in earlier years. He was of medium height and on the heavy side. His fierce black upturned handlebar mustache was thicker than that of the Kaiser, but it turned up a few degrees less sharply.

  Franz Ferdinand maintained his own para-governmental military chancellery, with the consent of the emperor: Franz Joseph had extended official recognition to it in 1908. With the aid of this personal staff, Franz Ferdinand, in the words of a recent historian, "came to enjoy influence, even power, and to have a say if not a veto over the posts of war minister or chief of the general staff."

  The Archduke took a lively interest in his country's armed forces, but his tendency, in the many international crises that erupted in his lifetime, was to draw back and avoid warfare. In this (though not in much else) he would have been the true political heir of Franz Joseph, who had seen his empire lose crucial wars and whose preference, in the international crises of the early twentieth century, seemed to be for peace.

  Franz Joseph, as 1914 began, was eighty-four years old. He had ascended the throne in 1848. Most of his subjects could remember no other ruler. In his old age his image was that of a kindly older gentleman: a grandfather figure. He symbolized continuity with the past and with its values and virtues. While the night still was dark, he arose to perform his duties. He started work each day at 5:00 a.m. and put in twelve or more hours on the job.

  With the dutifulness and devotion came a certain stiffness: an unwillingness or inability to give; a lack of flexibility that seemed to characterize the arthritic Hapsburg regime as a whole. Its literature suggests that frustration and repression lay behind the excessive formality of Viennese life; and that the city's most famous psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, may not have been entirely wrong in suggesting that unacknowledged lusts, illnesses of which people were ashamed, and practices then regarded as perverse were widespread beneath the surface. Franz Joseph, the virtuous emperor, himself infected his beautiful wife with a venereal disease, and spent his life with the actress Katharina Schratt, a mistress—if that is the accurate word—whom, scrupulously, he never touched except on her shoulder. His only son, his then heir, the Crown Prince Rudolf, died together with a young ballerina of gunshot wounds that it was hard to believe were suffered (as the official version would have it) in a hunting accident. Mayerling, a motion picture of the 1930s starring Charles Boyer, told a story that sounded more plausible: a suicide pact between doomed lovers whose society would never permit them to marry one another.

  Franz Ferdinand, a cousin who succeeded Rudolf as heir to the throne, was another royal figure who was penalized for marrying the woman he loved.

  Tall, dark, poor but proud, Countess Sophie Chotek von Chotkova und Wognin was employed as a lady-in-waiting in an archducal household that Franz Ferdinand visited often. It was assumed that he was courting one of the daughters of the house. Their mother was aghast to discover that this was not so—that it was a mere "blind"— and fired Sophie, the true object of his pursuit. Franz Ferdinand proposed to marry Sophie. The Emperor objected.

  Sophie was indeed of the ancient nobility, but her impoverished family had lacked the money to perfect their claim to be included in the list, prepared by the European powers in 1815 (after the Congress of Vienna) of those eligible to marry and transmit royalty. Insisting on marrying Sophie anyway, Franz Ferdinand took her as his spouse in 1900. He was thirty-seven, she thirty-two. Franz Ferdinand was forced to settle for a morganatic marriage, forswearing forever the right of his children to succeed to the throne, and excluding Countess Chotek (later Duchess of Hohenberg) from a position by his side at formal functions (she was banished to a relatively lowly status). Prince Alfred Montenuovo, the Imperial Lord Chamberlain, was the official in charge of court etiquette, and as such seemed to make himself her particular enemy.

  Emperor Franz Joseph apparently feared that once Franz Ferdinand became emperor in his turn, he would go back on his word, perhaps obtaining a papal dispensation to do so, and would make Sophie his rightful empress, upgrading the rank of their three children as well as putting them in line of succession to the throne. In the light of that probably justified fear, it seems all the odder that the court officials dared carry on their petty persecutions of Sophie, administering protocol in such a way as to repeatedly humiliate her in public. One day she might well have been able to pay them back; indeed, Franz Ferdinand might have enjoyed doing so himself.

  The heir apparent was not likable. Few of his contemporaries had a kind word to say for him. The one thing about him that was (and remains) attractive was his love for his wife and children. When he was asked in 1913 to inspect the armed forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina in maneuvers scheduled for late June 1914—an unappealing request in some respects—one of the reasons he may have accepted was that, because of the special status of Bosnia-Herzegovina—it was in a sort of limbo while Austria and Hungary contested its ownership— Sophie would be allowed to take her place next to him during official proceedings. Ceremonies were planned in the
provincial capital of Sarajevo on June 28, their wedding anniversary.

  It also should have been not merely noted but underlined by the Hapsburg officials responsible for the planning of events that June 28—at least according to the modern Western calendar—was the anniversary of the First Battle of Kosovo (1389), at which medieval Serbia supposedly lost its independence to the Turks. The Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina, restive in any event because of having been annexed by Austria, might well have been expected to take exception to a display of Austrian government on that particular date.

  Austrian officialdom had a reputation for efficiency belied by its record in arranging this particular trip. The electricity failed as the Archduke boarded the railroad car. Footmen hastened to light candles. Normally ill-tempered, Franz Ferdinand instead made a joke of it; it looked, he said, as though he were entering "a tomb."

  The Archduke and his consort departed in the rain early the morning of Wednesday, June 24. They traveled from Vienna separately, by different routes, and rain followed them. Sophie arrived first at their destination: the spa of Bad Ilidze, outside the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. Franz Ferdinand came late the afternoon of Thursday, June 25. They stayed at the Hotel Bosna, which had been taken over for the duration of their stay by the authorities. Townspeople had loaned furniture and furnishings to the hotel so that it would look its best for the visitors.

  That evening, on the spur of the moment, the visiting couple decided to go into town, shopping. In Sarajevo they browsed along a market street where artisans made and sold their handicrafts and merchants plied their wares. They spent time in a rug shop. The crowds that followed them seemed friendly and welcoming.